Preamble 3: “The Deeply Experiential Ecology of ‘Just This’”

These passages hark back to the streams of analogical and metaphorical language that have an unbounded character, but that form firm and flexible fabrics of dependent co-arising, empty of self-existence, but full, at once, of relations—ancestral and inherited, at work in our time in visible and invisible ways, and also, of course, yet to be what they will become. This is true of the curriculum as inherited by schools. In schools, it is not as if things we are entrusted to teach and learn are fixed and given and then we simply have to abide the arrival of children not yet versed in such fixities. Instead, such arrivals open up what seems to have been closed, enliven what seemed dead and finished, helps us remember what is forgotten underneath the surface: “whether life itself has a chance or whether the surface is all there is.” (Smith, 1999a, p. 139). Such characteristics—opening what seemed closed, enlivening what seemed deadened and passed, remembering what has been forgotten—are the characteristics of hermeneutic truth conceived as aletheia (Moules, 2015, Jardine, 2012e, p. 122).